Army veteran and Purple Heart receipient Ford Carey still dreams about the time he spent fighting in Italy during World War II.

“I dream sometimes I’m over there and I don’t know my way back home,” he said. “And I study about it sometimes at night before I go to sleep.”

Though he’s never forgotten the war, it wasn’t something he talked about much for many years, being raised in an age where one often kept their feelings and thoughts to themselves.

His niece, Lillian Chandler, remembers the Memorial Day years ago when she and her sister, Susan Young, took carnations around to veterans in the area.

“That was the first day Uncle Ford opened up about some of his experiences during the war,” Chandler said. “It was something he’d just never talked about much. It was fascinating.”

Chandler also remembers reading letters Carey sent her mother (his sister), Hester Sartain, during the war.

He was a married 24-year old man with an 18-month old son when Army draft papers arrived on his farm in Shiloh with orders for him to report to Fort McPherson in East Point. From there he sent by train to Fort Hancock in New Jersey for training.

“When we left (Georgia) on that train and then got off in New Jersey, it was snowing and cold and some of those 18-year old young boys were squalling like babies,” Carey remembers.

He was none too happy himself, since it was his first trip away from home and from his large family.

His wife, Louise, and son, Wayne, later joined him for a while before he shipped out for Italy to serve in the army infantry.

Carey served overseas in the Allied Italian campaign for eight months before he was wounded while in a foxhole in a wheat field during the Battle of Rimini near Rome on Sept. 14, 1944.

Carey said he was holding his arms up to take a drink of water from his canteen when a missile, called a “screaming Mamie,” (so nicknamed for the sound it made as it was coming in) hit the foxhole, striking him in both elbows and wounding nine others as well.

After the strike, he and his platoon remained pinned down by German enemy fire while the battle raged around them. The were unsure of who was coming for them – friend or enemy. Medics had stopped the bleeding, but could do little else until they were picked up by Army jeeps that night and taken to hospitals in Rome, Naples and Florence.

As they loaded him into a jeep, they laid all his possessions on his chest, one of which was a New Testament he had carried with him. He lost all of it during transport, including the Testament.

Carey, unable to feed, dress or care for himself for weeks, depended on a kind fellow soldier to help him, including writing letters home to his family. He received sulpha drugs and was given penicillin shots in his injured arms every four hours.

“My arms looked like pin cushions,” he said.

“The family didn’t know anything except he was seriously wounded,” Chandler said. “I remember Mama saying they didn’t know for a while if he was alive or dead.”

Carey said his platoon was struck even harder the very next day, with many of them being killed. His squad leader, a man by the unusual name of “Liptack” showed up at the hospital soon after, one of his legs blown off.

Carey said he saw many other wounded soldiers during his stint in the hospital, some grievously injured, many with multiple limbs missing.
“I never felt I had anything to grumble about after all I’d seen,” Carey said.

On Dec. 15, Carey boarded a hospital ship bound for Charleston SC.

“It felt like heaven,” he said of the floating hospital. While on board, Carey was given the task of serving juice to 40 other patients, which he said he enjoyed. The ship landed in Charleston in early January and Carey was then sent to an army hospital in Oklahoma for four months where he underwent three separate surgeries on his arms. He didn’t get to see his family during that time, which now included a new son, “Wimp,” who was nine months old by the time his dad first saw him.

After a brief visit home, Carey returned to service on a Florida base until the war ended.

A FAMILY LEGACY

Carey, now 95, is one of the oldest living WWII veterans in the Madison County area and is a native of the Shiloh community, where he still lives. He and Louise had two more sons, Wendell and Wesley, and a daughter, Wanda.

He is also one of the 12 children of Sanford and Era Fitts Carey. During WWII, he had a brother, Lafayette Carey (also received a Purple Heart recipient) and three brothers-in-law overseas.

Over the years since, many of Ford’s relatives have fought in the ensuing wars – Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“We have several who are in service right now,” Chandler said.

The family is proud of their legacy and feels blessed with their “good genes,” you see, Ford Carey is not unusual in the longevity of his life. All eleven of his brothers and sisters lived to be elderly, and three of his “baby” sisters – Annie Mae Smith, Stuart Kirk and Roberta Dove, still survive.

Carey attributes their long lives to faith, family and hard work.

Carey was farming the land he still lives on when called to service and he continued to farm, raising cows and chickens, long after he came home. In fact, he was still picking up eggs in the family chicken houses until 2010.

“I’ve worked hard all my life,” Carey said, smiling as he acknowledges that the fact that being a “hard worker” stood him in good stead on those 25-mile army hikes, as well as those long days on the farm.

Thank you Mr. Carey for your part in making my world a good one. I wish society had not forced you to "stuff it"; you should have talked about your experience whether people wanted to hear it or not, particularly your kids and grandchildren. My father never did, either, until it all came out during his Alzheimer's decline in fits of fright.

We grew up thinking WWII was dusty, boring, ancient history and yet here we had an actual participant, a bomber pilot, in our household. And next door and all around! How I wished he would have shared it with us! The society of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was so locked up in conformity and pretense that there was no room for bursting that bubble of forgetfulness. At least now we can talk about reality, ugly or not. That's a good thing.

Again, thank you, Ford Carey, for your service and for sharing your sacrifice with us. Thanks mostly to all who never made it back.

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